I've always enjoyed the compositions of Hidehiro Funauchi, especially his stuff for Castlevania 2: Belmont's Revenge (GB). I just discovered an other gameboy game however that he worked on and it has some pretty swank music. It's called Quarth.

Mothra wrote:While I generally loathe the sound of Genesis, when it's good, it's filthy and wonderful.

I used to be a big Genesis hater for a long time because I was used to the bad music you came across playing a lot of the American Genesis games made by companies like EA and I think Activistion too. The composers they used were young guys who were... idiots. They wanted their soundtracks to sound like real contemporary rock/pop/hiphop and to achieve this they relied too heavily on the Genesis' sampler. The problem with that being, its sampler was terrible. It had very little sample memory and so you were forced to either have very few decent quality samples, a lot of really shit ones, or something in between. Creative coding and use of sounds helped out a little but not much. The result is that today, when stuff like chiptunes are actually seen as legitimate, those Genesis sound tracks that were trying to sound modern and mature, ironically sound dated and terrible. They were fighting against the limitations of the system, rather than working with its strengths.

But the Genesis was capable of much more than this. Unlike the SNES which was a pretty straight forward multichannel sampler that could mimic any sound you wanted, the Genesis' sound hardware was a strange hodgepodge of 80s-90s videogame console sound components. Its sampler was much more limited than the SNES and should have only been used to add a few distinct sounds to a game soundtrack to make it unique from those of other games on the system. It also had a PSG like that of the NES, Gameboy or Master System (in fact I think it may well have been the Master System's chip) which gave it some combination of square wave, triangle wave, noise, and maybe even sawtooth wave channels. This allowed it to throw in little nostalgic sounding cheeps and chirps or that distinctive, hearing test style triangle wave base boop that we all remember from the Megaman power up presentation cutscenes. Last but not least, it also had an honest to goodness FM Synthesizer chip. This allowed the genesis to sound like, well, synth pop. American Composers seemed to hate this and thought it sounded old fashioned, but Japanese composers loved it and used it and the other components in concert to create the best music possible on the Genesis.

The SNES' multi-channel sampler allowed it to mimic or emulate a huge diversity of sounds and styles of music which is what we remember it for; but the Genesis sounded more "live" with it's fuller synthy sound. It sounded like it was performing the song for you rather than just playing back approximations. Not to shit on the SNES, I love the SNES, but it always sounded artifcial, like a compromised recording but then that was part of its charm in my opinion.

I think there are a few games that managed to pull off the "man i wish i had an electric guitar to work with" groove without shitting the bed, but yeah there are probably three times as many that couldn't. Still, dang, those that do.

They've got that raw feel to them but they still sound like they're working with the hardware instead of trying to drag it kicking and screaming. And when you got a high-intensity piece like Blade's Theme up there as well as something sad and delicate like...

...coming from the same Genesis game, you know you've got a sound crew that doesn't mess around.

Suzanne Parkinson wrote:It also had a PSG like that of the NES, Gameboy or Master System (in fact I think it may well have been the Master System's chip) which gave it some combination of square wave, triangle wave, noise, and maybe even sawtooth wave channels.

Yeah, the Genesis sound chip was actually the Master System CPU. You could buy some sort of adaptor for the Genesis that would emulate a Master System by routing the data from a MS game directly through the Genesis sound chip. That sort of thing is fascinating to me for some reason.

When I picked my entries for the Hottest NES Music poll, there are several I thought of at the time but didn't make my absolute top 5, and several that would have made my top 5 but hadn't occurred to me on the spot. Such is life in the zone. Here, in no particular order, is how I will silence my regret!

Well that went somewhere I didn't expect, wow. That said the notion of music for a pinball machine is strangely foreign to me. I know it's absolutely a thing, but I've been to a number of arcades in the day and I can't remember ever being any sort of music you could hear above the general ambient people noise. Maybe the operators around here just keep the volume low.

In other news, "a Guilty Gear game has rad music" isn't much of a revelation by now, but...

I've played Xrd at my brother's place a bunch, but we always went straight to the fighting and I never had the opportunity to linger on the menu screen for this beauty to play out until I got the PC version for my birthday and spent some time adjusting my video settings. Daaaang but this bit at 1:58 gives me chills every time.